Gallery working through copyright
Ararat Gallery Textile Art Museum Australia’s involvement in a project to digitally photograph its permanent collection to make it more accessible to the community has prompted investigations into arts law.
In 2019, the gallery became one of three regional gallery collections to participate in Creative Victoria’s Regional Digitisation Roadshow.
This pilot program involved about 900 art pieces being digitally photographed during five weeks in 2019, with the intention of publishing images on a new Victorian Collections website for anyone to view at any time.
Ararat Rural City Council chief executive Tim Harrison said the gallery team had since been assessing copyright permissions the gallery had, or needed to obtain, in order to publish the artworks online – a process involving many phone calls, emails and meetings.
Dr Harrison said the gallery team, to help with the process, had connected with Arts Law, a community legal centre that provided services to artists and arts organisations.
“Staff spent several sessions discussing and developing a non-commercial copyright licence with an intellectual property lawyer from Arts Law, adapting one of their templates to fit the gallery’s requirements,” he said.
“With advice from lawyers, the team has endeavoured to make the licence as future-proof as they can, keeping definitions open to hopefully allow for new publishing and cataloguing technologies that develop in the future.
“There are about 450 artworks to seek licences for. That isn’t necessarily 450 artists, as we might have up to 10 works by the same artist in our collection, but regardless, a significant undertaking to continue.”
Dr Harrison said the digitisation project was an important extension of the gallery being a community-owned facility. It meant the collection would be accessible to a broader cross-section of the population by being online.
Ararat residents established Ararat Gallery TAMA in 1968 by raising money to acquire art works through a range of activities including a ‘discotheque’, pancake and champagne nights, and a ‘Bonza Booze and Bangers Nite’.
This community-led acquisition program continued until Ararat Rural City Council took over the gallery in 2005.
Facts that have come out of the digitisation project include: • The Japanese Packaging collection consists of 186 objects. Because these were commercially produced, they are out of copyright and the gallery can publish images of them without a licence. While digitising the associated files for this sub-collection, the gallery learned the objects travelled between 10 galleries in Australia and 11 in New Zealand from 1979 to 1981 before being distributed between TAMA, Art Gallery of NSW and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston. • The Grimwade Costume Collection includes about 450 items. The gallery believes most of these will also be out of copyright due to the fashion brands producing commercially, but there might be some boutique-custom pieces that are still covered. • The gallery holds 42 Lionel Lindsay works. The National Library of Australia is the intellectual property holder for his work and has given TAMA permission to use the images. • There are 40 Frances Burke pieces. RMIT Design Archives is the intellectual property holder and has signed the licence. • The gallery holds a handful of other works already in the public domain not protected by intellectual property laws because the artists died before 1955.